China is trying not only to establish a new world record when it comes to empty buildings but now even with construction time, the tallest building in the world in 90 days.
Just wondering how long it will take to fill it up after construction.

According to its engineers, this will be the tallest skyscraper in the
world by the end of March of 2013. Its name is Sky City, and its 2,749
feet (838 meters) distributed in 220 floors will grow in just 90 days in
Changsha city, by the Xiangjiang river. Ninety days!

It's not a joke. According to the construction company, the skyscraper
will be built in just 90 days at the unbelievable rate of five floors
per day.

Pre-Fab Magic

They will be able to achieve this impossibly fast construction rate by
using a prefabricated modular technology developed by Broad Sustainable
Building, a company that has built 20 tall structures in China so far,
including the a 30-story hotel [constructed in 360 hours - see link for time-lapse video].

Record numbers

Unlike the Burj Khalifa, the tower will be mostly habitable. Its final
height will be 2,749 feet high (838 meters). Compared that to the Burj's
2,719 feet (829 meters), which include the spire at the top resulting
in a total of 163 floors.

Sky City will use an astonishing 220,000 tons of steel. The structure
will be able to house 31,400 people of both "high and low income
communities". The company says that the residential area will use
83-percent of the building, while the rest will be offices, schools,
hospitals, shops and restaurants. People will move up and down using 104
high speed elevators.

The record figures don't stop there: in addition to the 90-day
construction time—as opposed to the 210 days initially reported by the
Chinese media—the company claims it will cost $1,500 per square meter as
opposed to the Burj's $15,000 per square meter, all thanks to the
prefab technology.

They also claim it will be able to sustain earthquakes of a 9.0
magnitude and be resistant to fire for "up to three hours," as well as
be extremely energy efficient thanks to thermal insulation, four-panned
windows and different air conditioning techniques that were already used
in their previous constructions.

Relatively recent academic evidence explains how productivity
works in places with underdeveloped legal institutions and
cultural norms.
In 2009, Hsieh Chang-Tai and Peter Klenow found that
a big part of the reason why China and India are so much poorer than
the United States is that wildly unproductive firms are more likely to
survive in those countries than in America.
After running a novel
experiment, Nicholas Bloom, of Stanford University concluded
that these firms were so unproductive because they were horribly
managed (as opposed to having worse workers or inferior equipment). He
speculated that the unproductive firms were able to survive because
better-managed businesses were limited in their ability to expand thanks
to uncooperative capital markets and, intriguingly, a dearth of
trustworthy managers.

The problem is not the absence of people who
know how to run businesses but the society at large.

In another paper,
Mr Bloom and his colleagues argued
that entrepreneurs in poorer countries are reluctant to trust people
who are not directly related to them to manage any part of their
enterprises. They are afraid that people from outside the family will
steal from them and that the judicial system will not protect them. This
(not unjustified) fear limits the ability of good firms to expand. Once
you run out of siblings and cousins, you can't open more factories. The
result is that bad firms are not driven out of business. Conversely,
countries with higher levels of "social capital," i.e., trust, generally
have higher productivity and are therefore richer, precisely because
good firms have more resources available to drive out the bad ones and
increase the standard of living through creative destruction.

Our leaders need to be held accountable, says journalist Heather Brooke.
And she should know: Brooke uncovered the British Parliamentary
financial expenses that led to a major political scandal in 2009. She
urges us to ask our leaders questions through platforms like Freedom of
Information requests -- and to finally get some answers.
Worth listening carefully!

Social pressure, political and, above all, the shock of facts so
overwhelming as two suicides in recent weeks, the second on Friday, has
led the government and the PSOE to move faster. Both contacts for
accelerated progress towards an agreement to halt evictions more extreme
than in any case, will not materialize until next week. That agreement,
however, will not be retroactive and would apply to mortgages signed,
but not those that are in foreclosure. It would not serve to cases like
Egaña Amaya, the woman who committed suicide in Barakaldo.

The Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, solemnized the idea during an
election rally in Lleida: "These days we see terrible things, inhuman
situations, a person committed suicide when she would be evicted. It is a
difficult subject, you have to take it with all seriousness and
humanity. The government is talking to many people, we talked this
morning with the PSOE. I hope we can talk on Monday of the temporary
cessation of evictions affecting the most vulnerable families. And the
threshold of exclusion, to better implement the code of good practice,
so you can renegotiate the debt and remain in housing. It is a difficult
subject, I hope we can give good news to the whole of the Spanish."

The problem with an eviction moratorium is obvious. People will
have no incentive to pay their mortgages for the next two years. This will bring further stress the Spanish
banking sector and in turn to the Spanish government.

November 8, 2012

This is what social collapse and degradation looks like, a local brothel became
the head sponsor of a minor-league soccer club from Larissa. Now, the
same brothel which appears to have seen a substantial return on its
advertising spend, has decided to branch out... straight into a local
elementary school. That's right: a whorehouse is advertising its
"services" to children in an elementary school. In exchange for what?
Money to purchase a Xerox machine and a library.
From Kathimerini:

After
sponsoring a soccer team in Larissa, central Greece, brothel owner
Soula Alevridou is now extending her financial support to a school in
Patra, in the Peloponnese.

Following an open invitation
for sponsorship launched by a Patra elementary school parents
association, Alevridou pledged to donate 3,000 euros to the educational
facility in order to cover for a series of operational costs, a daily
Peloponnesian newspaper reported. According to reports, the funds would be used to purchase a photocopier and a library for the school.

Alevridou
recently agreed to sponsor the Voukefalas team in Larissa, central
Greece, paying more than 1,000 euros for the team’s players to wear
jerseys carrying the “Soula's House of History” logo, AP reported.

Another brothel, Villa Erotica, had also agreed to sponsor the Larissa team.